Gimme Something Better (11 page)

Dennis Kernohan:
The guy’s an evil genius. He was even more calculated than all four of the guys from Crime. He’s so calculated it’s ridiculous. I used to be offended by it back then, but now I think he was just smart. He’s still doing it. He’s made his whole fucking life off this thing. And you have to admire that. He had the most cred.

Al Ennis:
The person who did
Creep
magazine used to be a roommate with Jello. Jello would have his door open, and one day my friend told me really seriously, “Al, when Jello listens to a record—
we’ll
always pick up a magazine or we’ll read the liner notes or something?
He
sits there in front of the record player, and does nothing but just listen to the record.” I kinda had him like the old RCA Victor dog, doing nothing but listening. Just the music, baby. Jello Biafra: Back in Boulder, me and my friend John Greenway, who wrote the original lyrics to “California Über Alles,” we were sitting in his bedroom one night blasting punk singles with the windows open. Coming up with names for bands, names for people in bands, names for songs. I took the notebook with me when I came out west.

Klaus Flouride:
I’d been playing on the East Coast and in Detroit. Magic Terry and the Universe was this experimental group that was all tied in with the Warhol crew. Billy Squier was on guitar. I got sick of playing in bands that were basically white guys playing R&B and the whole attitude was, “I can drink you under the table.” It just really made me want to puke. So I moved out here.

Dennis Kernohan:
Ray was in this band, Cruisin’. They played all this ’50s shit, they played all the car shows, played at the fairs. Everybody knew ’em. It’d be on the radio: “Cruisin’, cruisin’, cruisin’,” with the echo and everything. They could play. Some of the bands that came up were pro bands who punked it up. There was a lot of that going on.

East Bay Ray:
The first band I saw at the Mabuhay was the Weirdos. They were playing “We Got the Neutron Bomb.” Right after I saw them, I put the ad out.

Klaus Flouride:
He ran the ad in
BAM
magazine. The whole reason for
BAM
existing was, when
Rolling Stone
up and left San Francisco, there was no magazine left that would stroke the Grateful Dead, the Eagles, and Jefferson Starship and all that sort of crap. So this magazine came along,
Bay Area Musician
. And it was nothing. They tried to sell it and no one would buy it. That was probably the worst place, the most disconnected place to advertise for a punk band. It had nothing to do with the punk scene. But basically I looked there and saw the ad.

East Bay Ray:
I had a card up at Aquarius Records. Biafra responded. Originally I was working with two singers, and one of them didn’t show up on time. Biafra showed up on time. Down on 44th Street in Oakland was a garage where we started it.

Klaus Flouride:
Ray had already met Biafra. And then I came over and Ray and I went to the garage and we played. He said, “What can you play?” And, “I dunno.” I figured “Peggy Sue” sounded like the Ramones. Sort of. I mean that’s what they were lifting. So we played “Peggy Sue.”

Jello Biafra:
I did “Peggy Sue” with Ray once.

Klaus Flouride:
We went through a ton of drummers. This one drummer we did a demo with, Carl Numb, I don’t remember what his real name was. The guy didn’t want to be in the group. But he was about the best drummer we’d gone through.

Jello Biafra:
I was still wavering back and forth and playing with other people, not sure whether working with Ray and Klaus was the way to go. They were a lot older than I was, and there was a lot of ’70s bar-band damage to hack through with them. Solos and fills in every possible place were not necessarily the best for punk music.

Klaus Flouride:
We gave Dirk the demo, but he wanted a picture of the band also. Biafra had met 6025 at the Mabuhay, and asked him if he wanted to pose as our drummer in the picture. So he did. And then he said, “Well, I can play guitar, you know.” And we said, “You do? Well, come on and join the group.”

East Bay Ray:
To this day, people think 6025 actually played drums with us. Not realizing that he just fit in the picture.

Klaus Flouride:
We still were looking for a drummer. Ted was the first person who rushed us. That was exciting, because everybody else wanted to do stuff slower. He was really, really good.

Jello Biafra:
“You know what would be the coolest name for a band—Dead Kennedys.” They still argue about which one of them it was. Maybe they even told me at the same party. It was a guy who called himself Radio Pete, real name Mark Bliesener, who later managed the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. And the other was Rick Stott, who clerked at Trade-A-Tape and Records, and was also the manager of Colorado’s first punk band, the Ravers. What Rick didn’t tell me until a few years ago was, it hadn’t popped into their heads. They’d heard about another band from Cleveland called Dead Kennedys. They didn’t tell me that part.

Klaus Flouride:
I figured it would last six months, maybe two years. We’d get to go to L.A. once in awhile if we were lucky.

East Bay Ray:
We saw a lot of punk bands at the Mabuhay. There was definitely an inspiration, shall we say. I thought that with the trained ability there, we could be the best punk band in San Francisco.

Jello Biafra:
It wasn’t clear-cut. I was desperately wanting to do something. At first I thought punk was the biggest thing since Beatlemania, or the mid-’60s Rolling Stones. Which meant that the opportunity might close in less than a year.

Klaus Flouride:
We all figured out that we liked the Screamers. No guitars in the group at all. But they were so intense. We didn’t want to sound like the other groups, definitely. We’d put a weird chord in there, lifted from the Residents’ concept. We would take certain things from different things, and just sort of jumble them together.

East Bay Ray:
We wanted to rock out and not be so arty that it didn’t rock. But we didn’t want to be just so rocking that it’s boring. Like Bob Seger or something. If you go through and analyze our song structure, it’s Beatles and Motown melody. But doing the Ramones thing—that was done.

Jello Biafra:
I started bringing a guitar to Ray’s, just picking the notes out single-string. Then eventually Klaus said, “Why don’t you just sing ’em to us? You sing on key, go ahead and do it that way.” And he was able to pick stuff up and then teach it to Ray.

East Bay Ray:
6025 was a big fan of Captain Beefheart. He brought in the song “Ill in the Head,” which is like, oh, okay, we got a 13/8 section, and an 11/8 section. You can’t really feel that stuff. So we had to write it out.

Jello Biafra:
After the majors pulled out, the game changed. Ray was desperate to be on a major label and that was a source of contention. He didn’t want to call the band Dead Kennedys because, he said, “The record companies won’t sign us.” As soon as I started telling people like Negative Trend and the Dils that was the name of the band, the other guys couldn’t get rid of it. It had touched such a raw nerve with Ray and Klaus, I realized I was on to something.

Klaus Flouride:
Our first show was terrifying. It went by like lightning. We only had seven songs to play. We got an encore, so we did “Rawhide” again. 6025 had never played in a band onstage before. So there he was playing guitar, and he had a curly cord, and some guy came up and wrapped the cord around him. And he was going, “Oh man, what do I do?” I waited for the song to end, and I just unplugged the thing, and unwrapped it around, plugged it back in. He was like, “Oh, okay!”

Howie Klein:
It was obvious that they weren’t just another band that was gonna come and go. They were something special. I saw that right away. Biafra was an absolute talent. And he had a band behind him that were tight and good.

Klaus Flouride:
One of the real early gigs was Sproul Plaza. It was sponsored by the university. The Zeros and us, I think that was it. We were sort of having a war with the guys playing the conga drums around the corner. There was maybe 40 people watching the thing. It was great, we just took an extension cord, set up on the ground and played.

Dennis Kernohan:
When they first started playing at the Mab, punk was a big thing by then. People were coming from Hayward and everywhere. The Mab was packed every fucking night. It was crazy in there. Eric just kicked everybody’s ass. It was ingenious, I’m telling you.

Hank Rank:
They were an energetic band and popular almost immediately. They really ascended quickly. Jello, I always thought he sounded like Katharine Hepburn when he sang. But that was me. I never considered myself a fan but I certainly acknowledge their place.

Penelope Houston:
Their songs are good and I liked the lyrics and everything, I thought Jello’s voice was irritating. I think there’s probably a million people who’d say that.

Klaus Flouride:
November 23rd show, the 15th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. Sun Ra played in the afternoon, and some of them stuck around to see us. Herb Caen wrote an article a couple days before the show: “Just when we thought Jonestown bad taste has reached its nadir, along comes this group called Dead Kennedys.” And he knew that just by saying we’re trashy, he was doing us this huge favor.

Al Ennis:
It took them awhile. Someone put on a show in Berkeley, and it was in an African restaurant down on San Pablo and University. We went down there and got totally drunk, just slam dancing amongst ourselves. There was 16 people at a Dead Kennedys show. It might have been a bad night.

Jello Biafra:
We did it with no expectations of being popular or making money. We did wanna put a record out, which meant stashing most of our gig money, even the five-dollar Wes Robinson gigs. We did that for a year, it went into a bank account Ray was running. And then we had money to make the “California Über Alles” single.

East Bay Ray:
I put up half the money, and then everybody in the band agreed that we took half the money from the gigs. And we went and recorded it. Ted and I basically were the distribution. We drove it around, stores like Aquarius would take it on consignment.

Klaus Flouride:
I wanted a big-hole 45. It was an absurd reason. I wanted it to be able to be played in jukeboxes. I think they did put it in a couple of jukeboxes, and I bumped into them every once in awhile. It was great when we’d come to a town, we’d be eating in some restaurant that people’d drag us to. Then all of a sudden, on the jukebox “California Über Alles” would come on. It was like, okay, see? Because it had a big hole.

Jello Biafra:
Alternative Tentacles started as just a name to put out the first Dead Kennedys single. No one else was gonna put it out. We had to do it ourselves. Ray did most of the work putting it together and getting it distributed.